Hideous Kinky

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Two little girls are taken by their mother to Morocco on a 1960s pilgrimage of self-discovery. For Mum it is not just an escape from the grinding conventions of English life but a quest for personal fulfilment; her children, however, seek something more solid and stable amidst the shifting desert sands.



'Just open the book and begin, and instantly you will be first of all charmed, then intrigued and finally moved by this fascinating story' Spectator.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In this semi-autobiographical novel based on her own childhood, Freud (Summer at Gaglow), tells the story of Julia, a hippie mother traveling with her young daughters, Lucia and Bea, through North Africa in the 1960s. (The girls, true to their impish nature, love to use the words "hideous" and "kinky.") Events are described through the eyes of five-year-old Lucia, and therefore rely more intensely on sensations than on concrete details. This experiential quality translates well to audio in Freud's tenderly evocative reading. As the family travels from Tangier to Marrakech, by rail and sometimes hitchhiking, Lucia gives her child's-eye impressions of street performers, beggars and holy men. As audio, the telling is richly atmospheric and exotic, with a strong undercurrent of wistfulness that comes from a little girl always questioning her mother's actions. Based on the 1992 Pillar hardcover. (Apr.) FYI: A movie based on the book, directed by Gillies MacKinnon and starring Kate Winslet as Julia, recently opened in theaters. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

A young English child recounts travels and a lengthy sojourn in North Africa with her freedom-loving mother and security-seeking older sister--in the fiction debut of a London-born actress. The narrator--who turns five during the novel--has been born into such chaos that she takes it for granted. (The book's title comes from the only words spoken by the mentally and physically declining wife of one of Mum's boyfriends; unaware of the woman's suffering, the narrator and sister Bea turn Hideous! Kinky! into magic words for a game of tag.) In Morocco, the girls make friends with beggars, run about barefoot, dirty, and caftan-clad; they also eat hashish candy, live with the poor, have henna hair treatments from prostitute neighbors, travel with Bilal--the street entertainer who becomes Mum's lover--and go to Algeria (Bea refuses, so Mum simply leaves her behind) to seek Sufi wisdom. Throughout here, Mum repeatedly puts her family at risk--but without worse consequence than Bea seeking stability with a missionary and the narrator hoping Bilal will be her real father; the adventure therefore ends up seeming rather benign. The narrative seems too detailed, logical, and rich in cultural information to come from a five-year-old, while the more credible lack of perspective blunts any real understanding of the impact on the child. The potential tension between the girl's matter-of-fact account and the reader's presumed alarm rarely materializes. Best as travelogue: a fluently written inside view of Morocco.